Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity PDF
Preview Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity
Table of Contents Praise for ZIG ZAG Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction: Choosing Creativity The Eight Steps Mistakes We Should All Avoid How to Make Use of This Book The First Step: ASK: How the Right Questions Lead to the Most Novel Answers The Practices Onward . . The Second Step: LEARN: How to Prepare Your Mind for Constant Creativity The Practices Onward … The Third Step: LOOK: How to Be Aware of the Answers All Around You The Practices Onward … The Fourth Step: PLAY: How to Free Your Mind to Imagine Possible Worlds The Practices Onward … Solutions The Fifth Step: THINK: How to Have Way More Ideas Than You'll Ever Need The Practices Onward… The Sixth Step: FUSE: How to Combine Ideas in Surprising New Ways The Practices Onward… The Seventh Step: CHOOSE: How to Pick the Best Ideas and Then Make Them Even Better The Practices Onward … The Eight Step: MAKE: How Getting Your Ideas Out into the World Drives Creativity Forward The Practices How Do You Know When to Stop? Conclusion Learn to Choose the Right Step Discover Your Own Style Always Onward! Appendix A Outline of All of the Steps, Practices, and Techniques Ask Learn Look Play Think Fuse Choose Make Appendix B: The Research Behind the Eight Steps References Acknowledgments About the Author Index Praise for ZIG ZAG “Finally! A creativity advice book that is grounded in scientific research.” —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience “Zig Zag is the most fun and most useful creativity book I have ever read. Keith Sawyer's gem sweeps you up with a host of great stories, quizzes, exercises, and teaches you one way after the other to be more creative.” —Robert I. Sutton, professor of Management Science,\break Stanford University; author, Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule “In geometry the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But in creative pursuits, Zig Zag shows us, it's anything but. Keith Sawyer is the most creative person writing about creativity I know.” —Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor, The New Yorker; author, The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity “Creativity is essential in our journey to the future, and this gem of a book helps each of us on the way.” —Tim Brown, CEO and president, IDEO; author, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation “Keith Sawyer is the best combination of a brilliant creativity researcher and storyteller around.” —Peter Sims, author, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries “Zig Zag reveals the true nature of the creative process: improvisational, surprising, with unexpected twists and turns. The book is filled with hands-on activities that help you manage that process and keep it moving forward to a successful creative outcome.” —Josh Linkner, author, Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity To my son, Graham Introduction Choosing Creativity Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives. But creative experiences can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily in people's lives. It requires enormous personal security and openness and a spirit of adventure. Stephen Covey Creativity doesn't always come naturally to us. By definition, creativity is something new and different; and although novelty is exciting, it can also be a little scary. We're taught to choose what's familiar, to do what's been done a thousand times before. Soon we're so used to staying in that well-worn rut that venturing into new terrain seems an enormous and risky departure. But rest assured—you already have what it takes to be creative. Neuroscience and psychology have proven that all human beings, unless their brain has been seriously damaged, possess the same mental building blocks that inventive minds stack high to produce works of genius. That creative power you find so breathtaking, when you see it tapped by others, lives just as surely within you. You only have to take out those blocks and start playing with them. How, though? In fact, the journey's pretty simple. In this book, I share with you the eight steps that are involved in being creative. Once those steps become second nature to you, creativity won't seem rare and magical and daunting. You'll stop being scared of writer's block or stupid ideas or a blank canvas or a new challenge, and your creative power will be flexible, versatile, and available in unlimited supply. All you have to do is learn how to tap it. And that's the purpose of the exercises in Zig Zag. I started thinking about creativity many years ago, when I graduated from MIT with a computer science degree and found myself designing video games for Atari. Since then I've played jazz piano and studied how jazz musicians collaborate; earned a doctorate in psychology at the University of Chicago and studied how Chicago's improv companies create on the spot; researched theories of creativity in education; and studied how artists and sculptors teach creativity.
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